Pfhorrest

Agreed, and I think I pretty much said as much. Art is only objectively good inasmuch as a work of art is a kind of speech-act and speech-acts like al...

It's important here to distinguish, as always, between good ends and just means. On a utilitarian account of what makes for a good end (the greatest p...

As a poor person myself, and the child of poor people, I've decided not to have kids, and I advocate the same for others in my position (or worse posi...

I have, and also, I've studied this professionally for years, including a term entirely about Descartes. Descartes is trying to show that we can doubt...

Pretty sure you’ve got it backwards here. It’s an update on the Evil Demon: both are trying to show that the senses are unreliable because they could ...

That’s begging the question. The brain in a vat scenario tries to establish THAT we can’t rely on our senses. My rebuttal to it proceeds from the assu...

It is not a special feature of contemporary physics that says reality is made of mathematical objects; rather, it is a general feature of mathematics ...

A figure could appear out of thin air and tell you so, and demonstrate anything else you might want to see as evidence... like say, a feed from outsid...

I don’t think the hope is for harm to the people of these countries, but for the downfall of the oppressive governments that rule them. The answer to ...

If you are a brain in a vat, there are possible experiences that could inform you of that, e.g. if the people running the vat want you to know it. So ...

No rush, and nice to hear another artist-philosopher is here too. :-)

So, news from a while back was that the PPP got extended such that they have until the end of December to hire old employees back, and the whole time ...

So you admit to being a sockpuppet of @"Avery"? I suspect @"Baden" or @"Jamalrob" or someone might appreciate hearing about that.

More to the point, violent solutions are unlikely to work when non-violent democratic ones are available but don’t work. If you could magically get en...

Oh shoot, that finger was supposed to be a thumbs up.

I see you at 673 as of this posting. Mine seems to be working fine too.

“Science” has had different shades of meaning over history. It used the be used in a broad sense as any field of knowledge. Today it retains a little ...

Thanks! I just wish I could do dialogue, that’s mostly what keeps me from writing the huge work of fiction I’ve been sitting on my whole life. Yeah, t...

Science fiction is sort of art about our descendants, and I think that broadly speaking that kind of thing (speculative fiction, and its analogues in ...

:point: :clap:

Yeah. As in, what are the basic kinds of things (or stuff) that exist(s), and what is it to exist in the first place. What's sticky about that?

To the extent that I find “metaphysics“ a useful term at all, it’s in this way.

I find “metaphysics” a pretty useless and potentially confusing term, and more often just say “ontology”, which seems to be the thing people more ofte...

This is the same problem right here. Making someone do something doesn’t “create good” in any sense whatsoever. You’re basically straight up saying mi...

“Rightness” is an abstraction away from truth and goodness. The good and the true are paradigmatic examples of things that are, in their different way...

I enjoyed reading it, so thanks. :smile:

Because if reasons to question them come up, I will. Someone who does otherwise won't. That's the "blindly" part of "blindly follow": turning a blind ...

This isn't how rational argument works. You can't just say that something is a fact with nothing to back it up. I'm not talking about what parts of th...

That is exactly the problem, yes.

You have still yet to show that. You have shown that different people simultaneously think contrary things about what is more valuable than something ...

I do mean it all of those ways, as I went on to elaborate. It could be "right" as in true, or "right" as in good, in many different senses of "true" a...

That is not at all what "intrinsic" means in the field of moral philosophy... or even in physics, for that matter. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That’s instrumental value, exactly what I was contrasting intrinsic value with. Money is valuable for its use, like in saving lives, not as an end in ...

Why? The other way around is obvious but this seems obviously not.

When I say that people necessarily own themselves, i.e. necessarily have rights over themselves, I don't mean that those rights are necessarily recogn...

Property is important because it’s inextricably tied up with more basic concepts like rights and procedural justice. Procedural justice is about adher...

I distinguish between beauty specifically and artistic merit generally, but I agree with you about the relativity of artistic merit. Art in general is...

That is only necessary if both of those values are objectively important in and of themselves. In the example question you asked me about COVID manage...

My point was just that it’s one of these or the other. Either people accept the outcomes of these processes because they think they’re objectively rig...

This just seems to be an argument about what “blindly” means now. I’m taking that to mean what I call “fideism”: holding some opinions to be beyond qu...

You don't have to (and can't, and shouldn't) finish any infinite series of questioning before proceeding with your life. But being open to seeing prob...

So most people think these systems are morally correct, and not just someone's opinion? That means most people are moral objectivists. That was an exa...

Which I in turn criticize and reformulate, ad infinitum.

You've provided examples of disagreements, where each side of the disagreement has some argument, appealing to something that they value. But that's n...

...so long as people accept their outcomes as legitimately normative, i.e. as morally correct, as telling us what we ought to do, and not just as "wha...

No, I just “have terminal goals” (i.e. take morality to be something*) that involves the suffering and enjoyment, pleasure and pain, of all people. Wh...

:up: :100: :clap:

And you haven't provided any evidence that neither is. I don't think it can be conclusively proven one way or another whether objectivism is true or n...

I've never really understood the supposed distinction between these two. It makes it seem like objectivity is being conflated with transcendence, like...

I don’t just follow the rules blindly, I criticize the rules and make a great effort to be sure as I can that they really are the correct rules. NB th...